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Monday, August 31, 2015

I watched another Lifetime “world premiere,” with the rather
bland title Stolen from the Suburbs —
leaving me wondering just what
might have been stolen from the suburbs that a Lifetime filmmaker (in this case
Alex Wright, who both wrote and directed the show) would be interested in
depicting. It turned out it wasn’t a what, but a who: Emma (Sydney Sweeney),
restive 16-year-old daughter of Kate (who oddly isn’t listed on the imdb.com
page for the film even though she’s playing the leading role!), a single mom
who moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles after her husband died and is so
neurotically overprotective she freaks out when Emma tells her she wants to do
horrible, perverted things like hang out at shopping malls and date boys.
Before the main characters are introduced we get a scene showing the modus
operandi of the ring of human traffickers
who will ultimately “steal” Emma and her Black friend Courtney (Tetona Jackson)
from the suburbs, kidnap them and hold them in what amounts to a boot camp for
underage prostitutes of both sexes. Recruiter Johnny (the genuinely hot Mark
Famiglietti — as usual with a hot guy in a Lifetime movie, the moment you meet
him you know he must be up to no
good) approaches a couple of homeless teens, one male and one female, who are
hanging out under a lifeguard tower at a beach. He lures them out with promises
of food, shelter and a place to clean up at the “Los Angeles Teen Shelter,” and
claims there will be no police there and no curfew.

The two are suspicious but
eventually agree to get into Johnny’s white van — whereupon two heavy-set thug
types, Ivan (Rick McCallum) and Mike (Karl Dunster), grab them and tie them up.
Johnny (who’s referred to as “Tom” on the film’s imdb.com page — evidently
there were some changes before the film was finished) is then told by Malena
(also unidentified on imdb.com but played by a quite good blonde actress who
delivers a chilling portrait of matter-of-fact evil, especially later in the
film when she explains to Kate that as far as she’s concerned the kidnapped
children are just merchandise and all she cares about is the money) that homeless kids are already such
damaged goods that they are of little use to her, and he needs to find her nice
suburban teens. Johnny protests that such kids will be more difficult to
recruit, but he accepts the marching orders and turns up at the mall to which
Emma and Courtney have sneaked. Johnny has already got Courtney to accept him
as her boyfriend, and to lure Emma he’s brought along a skinnier, less openly
attractive but still cute guy named Adam — but when Emma tells mom she’s been
with a boy named Adam, Kate grounds her and says she’s not allowed to see boys
unless mom meets and vets them first. Emma escapes from her room and heads for
the mall, where Adam — who we’re not sure at first whether he’s a member of the
ring or an innocent victim himself — gives her a drugged drink and turns her
over to Ivan and Mike in the same sleazy white van we saw in the opening sequence.
From then on the film cuts back and forth between the sex slaves’ boot camp
Malena and the two thugs are running, and the demoralizing and brutal treatment
they put their charges through (in the days of U.S. slavery the process of
breaking down the captives’ will and forcing them to accept their fate was
called “seasoning”), and Kate’s increasingly desperate attempts to find her
daughter and to get the police detectives assigned to the case, Richmond (Neill
Barry) and Cordoba (Sabrina Perez), to give a damn. Stolen from the
Suburbs suffers from didacticism — a more
subtle filmmaker than Alex Wright might have been able to create a story in
which mom’s very overprotectiveness lures Emma to the dark side and shown a
longer seduction process before she realizes what her “boyfriend” really wanted
from her (in real life the pimps who do this sort of recruiting can spend weeks
getting their victims to the point where they’re so convinced the pimps “love”
them that they’re willing to turn tricks to show their own affection), but
instead he seems to be saying, “Girls, when your mother tells you not to date
guys she hasn’t met, just follow her orders, or you’ll end up a sex slave!”

It
also suffers from some pretty gaping plot holes and the usual loose ends of sloppy
thriller writers — including a hint that the sex traffickers have a “mole”
inside the police department, presumably someone they’ve bribed, which Wright
forgets almost as soon as he’s introduced it — and the outrageous plot
contrivance that Kate decides to infiltrate the prostitution ring by posing as
a Lesbian customer interested in buying Courtney’s services. (Emma hasn’t been
listed on the traffickers’ Web postings — which, we’re told, go on above-ground
sites like Craigslist disguised as ads from aspiring actors — because she’s
still a virgin and therefore the mysterious “Syndicate” that runs the
trafficking ring is saving her for a “special” customer.) There’s even a scene
early on in which Kate, who works for a building contractor, tears down a missing-child
poster from a tree near the latest project her boss is developing — he’s told
her to because advertising that children go missing from the neighborhood would
be bad business for the developer — and the volunteer who runs the agency that
put up the poster upbraids her and asks, “What if it was your daughter?” Eventually the volunteer and Kate team up
to run down the traffickers; they find Adam and Kate nearly kills him by
withholding the rescue inhaler he needs, but once they’ve got him to talk a
well-aimed shot by Johnny (who, in addition to his other sordid skills, also
appears to be a talented sniper) takes him out for good, so Kate and the
volunteer child-saver won’t have a live witness they can bring to the police.
For all its messiness, Stolen from the Suburbs is actually quite a good thriller; Wright manages to
sustain the suspense until the end (an all-out shootout at the traffickers’
compound, which seemed difficult to believe — an ending in which they leave the
girls behind but escape themselves would have been both more chilling and more
believable, but then movie traffickers, like movie drug lords, engage in more
and nastier violence than their real-life counterparts and do an awful lot of
shooting that wouldn’t be in their best interests in the real world) and we’re
genuinely in doubt as to how it’s going to turn out and whether mom will save
her daughter in time. Stolen from the Suburbs is gripping filmmaking and well worth watching, and
if Alex Wright can give himself a cleaner and more coherent script next time
(or get someone else to write one for him), his future films should also be
worthwhile entertainment.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

I watched last night’s
Lifetime “world premiere,” a film called Fatal Flip, a pretty routine production from that channel — it
was also shot under the working title The Fixer Upper but if Christine Conradt had written it (she
didn’t, though it might have been better if she had!) she would have called it The
Perfect Handyman. Jeff (Michael Steger) and
Alex (Dominique Swain), a young (straight) couple who’ve been living together
but have avoided even getting formally engaged, much less married (perhaps
they’ve just got “engaged to be engaged,” like that couple in an insane
marriage-and-family audio-visual film from Coronet in the 1950’s the Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 people famously mocked),
decide to take out a loan, buy a dilapidated house somewhere (this is nominally
taking place in New England but, being a Lifetime production, it was almost
certainly shot in Canada), fix it up themselves and then “flip” it — sell it to
someone else for a higher price that will cover the loan and their expenses.
Only because of the terms of the loan, if they can’t finish the job and resell
the house in 45 days they’re going to be socked with heavy interest penalties
and will lose so much on the deal they’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy.
They quickly realize they’re in over their heads on the repair job, and one day
at the analogue of Home Depot in this fictional world they run into Nick (Mike
Faiola), an all-purpose handyman.

Jeff cuts a deal with Nick to hire him to
help them with the remodel in exchange for a share of the profits they expect
from flipping the house, and since he’s homeless part of the deal is that he
can live in the house while they do the job. There seem to be only two other
significant characters, both women: the realtor (or is that “RealtorTM”?)
who sold them the house (unidentified, at least this early, on imdb.com’s cast
list), and Alex’s friend Roslyn (Tatiana Ali — the only cast member I’ve heard
of before), whose plot function is obscure but who at least provides some nice
eye candy for any straight guys who might be watching this. Both the women are instantly attracted to
Nick and they even make a bet with each other over who can get him first, but
Nick is casting lascivious eyes at Alex and challenging her to go to bed with
him just to prove she wants something more than the boring life she’s trying to
escape (both she and Jeff worked at a law firm and turned in their notices
simultaneously to take their flyer into fixer-upper-land). Of course, being a
reasonably attractive man in a Lifetime movie, he’s also got other quirks: we
see him having phone conversations with a woman with whom he’s presumably in
cahoots in some sort of scheme that involves latching on to a young couple
attempting to fix up and “flip” a house, joining their project, acing them out
of the house and killing them in the process. (In the “teaser” opening we’ve
seen Nick sealing up a wall in a previous project and we hear the muffled
screams of the woman he’s sealed up inside — so at one point writers Maureen
Bharoocha, who also directed, and Ellen Huggins had read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Cask of Amontillado” and decided it would be fun to do that plot twist in a
modern context.)

It’s only at the end that we learn Nick was only having those
phone calls in his imagination; he was really a carpenter who lost his own house via foreclosure
and responded by freaking out, killing his wife by suffocating her with a piece
of plastic sheeting, sealing her in the walls of the house he was being forced
to vacate, and setting off in search of other people with whom he can relive
this scenario. Alex’s Black friend Roslyn exits about two-thirds of the way
through when she lets Nick take her up to his redoubt in the house’s attic and
fuck her brains out, only in the morning she wakes up before he does and finds
a business card of his with another name on it; she goes on a (fictitious)
Internet search engine and digs up the truth about Nick, but when (like a
stupid character in a 1930’s movie) she confronts him directly — she’s gone to
the house hoping to warn Jeff and Alex, but that’s the night they’ve picked to
do a “date night” and so Nick is the only one there — he smothers her in a big piece of plastic sheeting and leaves her
body in the basement for later disposal. It creaks to a close when Nick makes
an outright pass at Alex, she turns him down, Jeff gives Nick a week’s notice,
then Nick spies on Alex through a crack in the walls as she’s taking a bath
(using an elaborate plumbing fixture from the house’s original 19th
century equipment Nick had successfully restored) and comes in on her while
she’s naked in the tub. Naturally she resists, and just then Jeff comes in on
them and orders Nick off the property immediately. Nick responds by sneaking
into their circuit breakers and breaking them all so the house’s electrical
power will cut out and they’ll be unable to turn it back on — and when they go
into the basement to fix it, he’s waiting for them with murderous intentions.
Only somehow Jeff and Alex are able to overpower him and Alex smothers him in the plastic sheeting, but isn’t able to kill
him; while they’re waiting for the cops to arrive he manages to escape, and the
final shot is of him in another city (but still dressed in the same plaid
flannel shirt and blue jeans he was wearing when he was introduced),
approaching another young man in a big hardware store to pull the scam again …

Fatal
Flip is a pretty
straightforward Lifetime movie, neither as bad as some of them nor as good as
others, and though director Bharoocha gets some nice Gothic effects during the
silent scenes in which Nick is sinisterly stalking Jeff and Alex through the
crumbling old pile they’re trying to restore into something saleable, she’s
hamstrung by the weaknesses of her cast. By far the best sequence is the marvelous
soft-core porn scene between Nick and Roslyn — and its interracial aspect just
adds a thrilling frisson — staged
in such a way that suggests he’s just one of those stick-it-in-and-get-off
kinds of guys who is out for his own pleasure no matter how much he roughs up
his partner in the process, while she seems happy with him that way, the rougher the better. (It’s
interesting that we get this subtle and dramatic insight into her sexual
desires when we learn virtually nothing about what she’s like outside the bedroom.) It doesn’t help that Mike Faiola as Nick is a reasonably
attractive man but hardly the drop-dead gorgeous babe-magnet the script tells
us he is, or that as his rival Jeff Michael Steger looks like the result of a
bizarre genetic experiment that attempted to cross-breed Harry Langdon and Tim
Allen. (He’s actually got a nice bod — and in the basket-to-basket department
he seems better hung than Faiola — but his face is pretty homely and too
undefined to sit on top of the rest of him.) I can’t really tell you how good
these people are as actors since the script doesn’t require much from them in
the way of acting, but I suspect there’s a reason Tatiana Ali is the only cast member here you’re
likely to have heard of before!

Saturday, August 29, 2015

The “feature” Charles and I watched last Thursday night was Sunday
in the Park with George, a 1985 video
presentation of the original Broadway production of the musical I consider
Stephen Sondheim’s greatest work. Indeed, if he’d done nothing else for the theatre
— no lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Jule Styne’s Gypsy, no A Little Night Music, Company,
Follies, Sweeney Todd or Into the
Woods — this one show would establish him
as one of the all-time giants of musical theatre. Sunday in the Park
with George was Sondheim’s first
collaboration with writer James Lapine after years of working with Hugh Wheeler
(a partnership that broke up in the wake of the failure of Merrily We
Roll Along, their adaptation of a 1934
George S. Kaufman play about a love affair, told backwards — beginning with the
couple breaking up and ending with their first meeting — though they had been
warned because the 1934 original had been a flop, too), and for the first act
they told the story of the real-life French painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891)
and the creation of his most famous work, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of
La Grande Jatte.” A few explanatory titles at the beginning of the video
explain that the Grande Jatte was a resort frequented in the 1880’s mostly by
working-class Parisians, though occasionally members of the upper class would
go out there as unobtrusively as possible on what in the U.S. in the 1920’s
became known as “slumming” trips. The show’s acknowledgment says it is “a work
of fiction inspired by the art of Seurat and what little is known of his life,”
and to that end Lapine invented the female lead of Dot (Bernadette Peters,
turning in a far finer performance than she did in the next Sondheim/Lapine
show, Into the Woods, because a
more realistic character gave her far more to work with), who’s both Seurat’s
mistress and his model.

In the opening scene he’s sketching her as one of the
figures he intends to have appear in the “Grande Jatte” painting and he’s
rudely telling her to keep still while she sings of her discomfort over her
“Sunday in the park with George.” The first act is about an hour and a half
long and deals both with Seurat’s work and with the “regulars” and
semi-“regulars” at the Grande Jatte whom he incorporates into the painting,
including a pair of soldiers (one of whom is a live actor, Robert Westenberg,
while the other is a cardboard cut-out, life-size and painted in Seurat’s
style, one of the sometimes annoying little “arch” touches that afflict
Sondheim’s musicals), a prominent artist and critic named Jules (Charles
Kimbrough) who praises Seurat’s work to his face and disses it behind his back,
an old woman (Barbara Bryne) who turns out to be Seurat’s mother, her nurse
(Judith Moore), a couple of women who cruise the soldiers, a boatman (William
Parry) who has a proletarian’s attitude of contempt for anyone with more money
or status than he, an obnoxious little girl with glasses and others. The act
artfully alternates between Seurat (Mandy Patinkin, coming off his star-making role
in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl and
turning in an otherwise good performance that’s just a bit too Jewish to be
credible as a 19th century Parisian artist — though I looked up the
Wikipedia page on the real Seurat and the photo there looks strikingly like
Patinkin in the show) creating and controlling this world of people who are
going to become the characters in his painting, and the real people themselves,
with their own ambitions, attitudes and actions. The central conflict is
between Seurat, Dot and Louis the baker (Cris Groenendaal), who’s also after
her and who seems like a much better match — at least he pays attention to her
and doesn’t just ignore her when he’s not telling her to hold still in one
uncomfortable position after another — and there’s an ironic Sondheim lyric in
which Dot compares the two men in her life and says Louis is also an artist,
only his artworks are far more
popular and are immediately enjoyed by their consumers.

The conflict ends with
a heart-wrenching duet between Seurat and Dot called “We Do Not Belong
Together,” and apparently in this performance it was so heart-rending it got to Bernadette Peters personally
and she cried through so much of it the producers decided her vocal was
unusable and she had to dub her own voice in post-production. Dot leaves Seurat
and marries Louis even though she’s pregnant with Seurat’s child, and a
typically ugly American couple who are visiting Paris and are singularly
unimpressed with everything but its pastries hire Louis to come to the U.S. with
them and make those spectacular French baked goods for them in America. Of
course, he brings Dot and “their” child, a daughter whom Dot names Marie
because she’s been teaching herself to read out of a red-bound primer in which
all the women mentioned in the examples are named Marie. (“Why is she always
Marie?” Dot complains, though later she gives that name to her daughter.) The
hour-long Act Two deals with a modern young artist named George (Mandy
Patinkin) who creates works he calls “chromolumes” (after
“chromoluminarianism,” one of the terms Georges Seurat coined for his painting
style, though the name for it that has entered the art history books is
“pointillism”). The chromolume we get to see in action is his Number 7, which
looks like a statue of R2-D2 topped with a large glass globe that shows
holograms while the rest of the machine puts on a light show — only when it’s
exhibited by the museum that commissioned it as an homage to Seurat’s “Grande Jatte” painting (the museum is
unnamed but the real “Grande Jatte” is part of the permanent collection of the
Art Institute of Chicago) the creation puts such a drain on the museum’s
circuits it shorts out and the display comes to an abrupt and unscheduled end.
When they fix the technical glitches and it resumes, it turns out to be a sort
of holographic biodoc on Seurat and the creation of “La Grande Jatte,” and in
what’s become the best-known song from the show (and virtually the only one
performed out of context), “Putting It Together,” the modern-day George laments
at how many sponsors are required for him to create anything and how he can’t work until the financial package
behind him is set.

Indeed, the reception for him after his display is more a
networking opportunity than anything else, and the actors who played the
characters in Seurat’s painting and his life in Act One reappear as typically
pretentious would-be patrons, critics and assistants, one of whom tells George
that after this project he’s leaving the art world and returning to his calmer,
less stressful former job with NASA. The featured guest at George’s opening was
his grandmother Marie (Bernadette Peters), who keeps insisting that he is the
great-grandson of Georges Seurat — which he refuses to believe for reasons
Lapine’s script keeps hauntingly ambiguous, though we get the impression that’s
a family burden he doesn’t want
the challenge of living up to and which would just add to the already large
number of stressors in his life. George (the modern one) gets an invitation to
present his chromoluminarian homage
to Seurat on the actual site of the Grande Jatte, which turns out to have been
heavily developed and full of aggressively ugly apartment buildings, and though
his grandmother Marie has died by then, he meets up with the spirit of his great-grandmother
Dot (she’s still played by Bernadette Peters, whose performance here is much stronger than the one she gave in the next
Sondheim-Lapine show, Into the Woods:
apparently playing a realistic character with human emotions and motivations
turned her on a lot more than playing a fairy-tale witch) and she re-energizes
him to do something new with his art — it’s never explained exactly what, but
the big duet between them, “Move On,” is essentially a continuation of “We Do
Not Belong Together” only with the opposite message: they do belong together, even as inspirations spanning the
generations rather than real people living at the same time. What’s more, Dot’s
appearance enables George finally
to come to grips with his legacy as Seurat’s great-grandson and to understand
that the mysterious words scrawled by Dot in the back pages of that red-backed
grammar primer — “Order. Design. Tension. Balance. Harmony” — were her
transcription of Seurat’s artistic credo.

I’ve seen this presentation of Sunday in the Park with
George several times and every time I’ve
found it utterly magical. The first time was with my late roommate, who watched
it on HBO when he was still getting premium channels and much to my irritation
turned it off after half an hour after I had got totally engrossed in it. The
second time was when it was rebroadcast on PBS and I recorded it on Betamax, a
tape I later showed to my late partner John Gabrish. I had worried it might be
too recherché a story for him,
but it turned out John had a personal connection to the painting: he was from
Sheboygan, Wisconsin but had lived much of his life in Milwaukee. The distance
between Milwaukee and Chicago is about the same as that between San Diego and
Los Angeles, so people in Milwaukee wanting a culture fix from a first-class
city go to Chicago the way San Diegans go to L.A. — so John had seen the
original painting at the Art Institute many times and the story came alive for
him because he knew the work so well. For me, I had a quite different reaction;
when I’d seen slides of the “Grande Jatte” in art history class in junior
college I had reacted much the way the artist and critic Jules does in Lapine’s
script: I had found it dull and emotionless. Seurat’s painting technique was to
use a restricted number of colors and apply his paint in the form of little
dots over the canvas so the eye would blend them together and see more and
different colors than were there in the actual paint. (Ironically, a color TV
image is essentially created the same way: what we were watching when we ran
this DVD was a series of dots — “pixels” — of colored light, either red,
yellow, blue or black, which the eye blends into a whole palette of really
existing colors. In a sense, the entire technique of halftoning that allowed photographs
to be reproduced in print and then allowed TV first to exist at all and then to
exist in color is an homage to
Seurat, who in real life had read works on color theory, including the one by
French author and chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who invented the color
wheel.) That’s one reason why he created so few works — he spent two years on
“La Grande Jatte” and the credits to this show claim only seven Seurat
paintings exist (though his Wikipedia page shows at least 12) — before his
death at 31. Other artists, from Van Gogh to Basquiat, may have died equally
young but they produced a lot more works in the time they had! So for me Sunday
in the Park with George gave me a greater
appreciation of Seurat’s work than I’d had before. Later I ran the tape for
Charles, who didn’t like it — this time around he enjoyed it more than he had
before, though he still isn’t as impressed by the show as I am.

I think it’s a
work of utter magic, and though it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama it was
snubbed by the Tony Awards, who gave Best Musical that year to La
Cage aux Folles (obviously influenced by
the social daring of doing a musical in which the central characters are a
middle-aged Gay couple, though in all other aspects La Cage aux
Folles is a depressingly ordinary musical
farce with almost none of the depth, richness, artistic quality and insight of Sunday
in the Park with George) — and this
production enables us to watch this magnificent piece with the actors for whom
Sondheim and Lapine created it. Patinkin and Peters are marvelous; yes, there
are times (especially during the big duets) during which I found myself wishing
to hear what weightier, more operatic voices might do with Sondheim’s songs
(which isn’t always how Sondheim himself wants them performed: I remember
reading how many singers, including Sarah Vaughan, work their asses off to take
the long lines of his best-known song, “Send In the Clowns” from A
Little Night Music, without pausing for
breath in the middle — only Sondheim said in an interview that since the song
is performed in the show by an actress playing an older woman, he expected the singers to pause for breath and didn’t
necessarily want the song sung with the superb breath control Sarah Vaughan
brought to it even when she was
no longer young), but I also love this show and appreciate the honest, natural
performing style Patinkin and Peters brought to the leads. Indeed, though the
music-to-talk ratio in Sunday in the Park with George is far more skewed to talk over music than the one
for Into the Woods,Sunday
in the Park with George is considerably
better constructed musically, with strains from the various songs used
effectively as leitmotifs and the
always awkward transitions from speaking to singing handled smoothly (far more
so than in Violet, the recent
musical I just saw “live,” where the plot was strong and the songs were good
but the junctures between them were so crude as to be wince-inducing). One
minor quibble: the arrangements of the songs played on stage used only eight
musicians, and the orchestrations by Michael Starobin sound a bit thin —
especially by comparison with the original-cast album, for which Starobin
beefed up his arrangements for more musicians and a bigger “sound” that would
work better on records. Sunday in the Park with George — despite that silly title (maybe it would have been
taken more seriously if it had had a name like Art Isn’t Easy, a phrase repeated many times in Lapine’s script) —
is a masterpiece, an absolutely magical work, and this performance is a document
of the original production and is fully worthy of it.

Suspicion falls first on the Peytons’ gamekeeper Allen Barnes (Clive Russell)
and his two daughters, one of whom is Clara Peyton and the other is a single
woman named Sass (short for “Saskia) (Charlotte Hope). Suspicion also falls on
the Colleys, husband Donald (Robert Morgan) and wife Bella (Anna Francolini),
who published Shane Thurgood’s first novel and paid his rent in hopes of
leaving him alone to write a second one — though they’re also under suspicion
themselves for tax irregularities writer Steve Coombes (whose script is based
on characters created by Ann Cleves — it’s often a bad sign when shows like
this are based not on the original author’s
stories but on ones cooked up by the TV producer’s own writers) doesn’t stop
his thriller plot long enough to explain. In fact, suspicion falls on a lot of people — like most British mystery writers,
Coombes tends to err in the direction of creating too many suspects rather than
(the American weakness) too few — and it’s hard to keep track of them all,
though at the end the killer is revealed to be Allen Barnes’ third child, son Louis (Aiden Nord), a queeny little
twink who was ridiculed by his dad and the Peytons for not being good at the
“stalking” game. He claimed to have seen the Emperor Hadrian but no one else
believed him, and when Shane challenged him while Louis was holding a gun, they
struggled, the gun went off and Shane bit the big one. I’ve seen better
episodes of Vera but the central character
is still a treat — as is Brenda Blethyn’s portrayal of her — and the show’s
producers had the smarts to surround her with good-looking guys, including her
assistant Joe Ashworth (David Leon, who alas left the show after this 2014
season) and a tall, striking-looking blond who works in Vera’s office and is
the only one who can successfully decipher Shane Thurgood’s manuscripts.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Two nights ago the Spreckels Organ Society presented the
annual silent movie night at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a
live organist (Donald MacKenzie, whose main gig is as the theatre organist on
the Compton organ at the Odeon Theatre in Leicester Square, London — an organ
Fats Waller recorded on!) accompanying a silent film and thereby bringing us as
close as we’re going to get to what a silent film showing was like “in the
day.” The film was For Heaven’s Sake, a
marvelous 1926 comedy starring (and produced by) Harold Lloyd, and while the
“official” director, Sam Taylor, had something of an independent reputation
(he’d also worked for Mary Pickford and directed the 1929 film she and her
then-husband, Douglas Fairbanks, did of The Taming of the Shrew — with the oft-ridiculed writing credit, “By William Shakespeare. Additional dialogue
by Sam Taylor”), for the most part it didn’t matter who was credited with directing a Harold Lloyd film
since Lloyd himself was the auteur.
I’ve noted in these pages before that most of the great silent comedians worked
within a specific part of the class system — Charlie Chaplin was lower-class
(once he worked out the “Tramp” character in his early days at Keynote and
Essanay he played nothing else for two decades, until Modern Times in 1936), Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was working-class,
Harold Lloyd was middle-class (usually he cast himself as a white-collar
striver) and Buster Keaton was upper-class. But there were occasions when
Keaton dropped down a notch and poached on Lloyd’s middle-class territory
(including doing a 1927 film called College that was an out-and-out ripoff of Lloyd’s The
Freshman), and in For Heaven’s
Sake Lloyd poached on Keaton’s territory
and cast himself as J. Harold Manners (I wondered if the name was a deliberate
parody on the then-popular playwright J. Hartley Manners).

J. Harold Manners is a rich playboy who literally has more money than he knows what to do with. The
character is introduced with a note that he’s bought a white car just so it
will match his outfit, and when he wrecks that car he calmly walks into an auto
showroom, sits down in the most expensive car on display, whips out a
checkbook, writes a check for the full price and drives off in it. While he’s
out in his new car it’s commandeered by the police and involved in a shootout
with gangsters, only the cops abandon it and grab someone else’s car after
Lloyd’s runs out of gas (typically cars in showrooms have very little gas in
them so even if someone steals one, they can’t get very far in it), and it ends
up stalled across a set of train tracks and, of course, is smashed into
smithereens by a train. (Oddly Lloyd didn’t steal Keaton’s famous gag of having
a train pass the car on an adjoining track without hurting it — and then another train coming the other way wrecking it. That would
have made an already funny scene even funnier!) A newspaper runs a rather
snippy column noting that J. Harold Manners bought — and totaled — two cars in
one day, and invites readers to write him to suggest other ways he can spend
his money. The item is noticed by Hope (Jobyna Ralston, the quite fine actress
who replaced Lloyd’s previous leading lady, Mildred Davis, when she quit to
become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real), daughter of Brother Paul (Paul Weigel), who
runs a pushcart dispensing free coffee to homeless people and wishes someone
would give him enough money to start a mission. Manners comes to the “downtown”
location (the titles say that in every city there’s an “uptown” where the rich
people live and a “downtown” where the not-so-rich live), immediately falls in
love with Hope at first sight, accidentally burns up Brother Paul’s pushcart
and writes a check for $1,000 to pay for it and give him the money to start his
mission.

Later he reads a newspaper headline that some rich guy has given some
poor preacher $1,000 to fund a mission downtown — and Manners is dismissive of
the whole thing, saying the guy probably gave the money just to get himself
favorable publicity. Then he opens the whole paper and finds out he is the benefactor — what he intended as an anonymous
donation has become anything but; there’s even a sign outside the building
announcing it as the “J. Harold Manners Mission.” (Given the penchant for rich
people today to slap their names on everything they fund, Manners’ reticence about the whole idea
is refreshing.) Manners goes to the mission, starts tearing down the sign, and
is confronted by Hope, who has no idea who he is and thinks he’s just a vandal.
Then he meets Brother Paul, who does
know who he is, thanks him and introduces him to his daughter, not knowing
they’ve already met and she’s insulted him. Nonetheless, to get close to Hope,
Manners becomes a volunteer at the mission. There are a few amusing scenes in
which Manners accidentally eats his own powder puff (men were starting to use
powder puffs in the 1920’s — a phenomenon credited to, or blamed on, Rudolph
Valentino, leading to the infamous “Pink Powder Puffs” editorial that so
incensed Valentino he literally challenged its author to a duel) and a cleaning
sponge thinking they’re the pastries Hope has baked for the mission clients.
Hope tells him that the real
challenge would be to get the neighborhood’s criminal element, which mostly
hangs out at Bob’s Pool Hall (which it’s hinted is also dispensing illegal
alcoholic beverages — this was
Prohibition, after all), into the mission — which he does, in a brilliantly
conceived gag sequence, by insulting him all and having them chase him until he
leads them into the mission. The film’s debt to Chaplin’s Easy Street is rather obvious, but it’s still very funny.

Eventually Manners proposes to Hope, she accepts, and they arrange to get
married at the mission, with her dad performing the ceremony and the crooks
they’ve redeemed — including their leader, “Bull” (played by Noah Young, though
he looked so much like Nat Pendleton Charles and I thought it was he and even
imagined hearing the lines in the dialogue title in Pendleton’s voice, with its
weird mixture of toughness and whininess) serving as the witnesses and
reception committee. Only three of Manners’ rich friends decide to kidnap him
and thus “spare” him from the fate of marrying so far beneath him — and this
sets up the final gag sequence, the funniest and most spectacular scene of the
film, in which Manners and his ex-gangster friends commandeer various vehicles,
including a bus, to get him to the mission before Hope assumes he’s abandoned
her and calls off the wedding. Lloyd once complained that he’d made only six
“thrill comedies” but those were the movies everyone remembered (and even
people who’ve never seen a complete Harold Lloyd movie no doubt recall that
iconic image of him dangling from the hands of the giant clock in Safety
Last), and certainly this is one of his
best and most exciting thrill sequences — indeed, Charles and I watched the
tail end of this movie a few weeks earlier on TCM and we’d both said, “Gee, I’d
really like to see the whole thing sometime.” For Heaven’s Sake isn’t one of Lloyd’s most strongly plotted movies,
and it doesn’t have the surprising darkness of 1927’s The Kid Brother (especially its scenes on board a derelict ship,
which reminded me so much of Murnau’s Nosferatu I wondered if Lloyd had seen it and was deliberately
parodying it), but it’s screamingly funny. Maybe Lloyd didn’t have quite the
depth as an actor or storyteller of Chaplin or Keaton, but so what? He was an
efficient laugh machine and his films are generally delightful.

After Charles and I got back from the Organ Pavilion I was
tired enough I’d wanted to go to sleep, but he was eager to grab the chance to
see something else and so he brought out Krovavaya nadpis, a.k.a. “A Study in Scarlet,” the second of that
11-episode series of Sherlock Holmes stories made by Lenfilm Studios in the
Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?) in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. A Study in Scarlet is one of the Holmes stories with real potential as
a movie, largely because (like the later Holmes novel The Valley of
Fear and Earl Derr Biggers’ third Charlie
Chan novel, Behind That Curtain)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle structured it so the first half featured a mysterious
crime which the sleuth solves, the second half is a flashback involving the
murderer and his victims and depicting why the murders happened, and then
there’s a brief tag scene in which the detective explains things at the end. In
1914, a pioneering British filmmaker named G. W. Saintsbury made a big-budget
(for the time) feature adaptation of A Study in Scarlet that reproduced the structure of Conan Doyle’s
original story and featured an elaborate re-creation of the Mormon trek — the
murder victims, Emil Drebber and Joseph Stangerson, were Mormons who decided
they wanted the fiancée of Jefferson Hope (the quite attractive Nikolai
Karachentsov) as Drebber’s fourth wife; they kidnapped her and forced her to
marry Drebber, but she only survived one month as his Wife No. 4 before she
caught sick and died, and Hope (whose last name is hilariously given as “Hop”
in the subtitles, which also refer to a “gait” when they clearly mean “gate”)
tracked the two men to London and killed them for revenge — that has led to the
1914 A Study in Scarlet being
listed as the first British-produced Western. Alas, though the 1916 Essanay Sherlock
Holmes has actually been miraculously
rediscovered via a negative in France, the 1914 A Study in Scarlet remains lost — though enough production stills
survive to indicate how prestigious a movie it was and how well-budgeted the
production was.

This version is
comparatively dull, with nothing of the Mormon flashback and a plodding pace;
one of the traps filmmakers doing Holmes stories can easily fall into is making
them too talky and static, and director Igor Maslennikov and writers Yuli
Dunsky and Valeri Frid (the same team who did this series’ much better first
episode, “Acquaintance,” which combined the meeting of Holmes and Watson from A
Study in Scarlet with the Conan Doyle story
“The Speckled Band” — or, as those rather demented subtitlers had it, “The
Motley Ribbon”) fall into that trap big-time. Also, for some reason they had
Hope write the word “Revenge” in blood on his crime scenes in English instead
of the German “Rache” which Conan Doyle used, though they did include Holmes’ (Vasily Livanov) testy relationships
with Scotland Yard inspectors Gregson (Igor Dimitriev) and Lestrade (Borislav
Brondukov) — he has a grudging respect for Gregson but finds Lestrade almost
totally incompetent — and the writers include Holmes’ marvelous speech
upbraiding the police for having let the crime scene of the Drebber murder (an
isolated abode shrouded in the legendary London fog, thank goodness) become so degraded
“a herd of buffalo might have tramped through it.” I’ve read one book on Holmes
that said real police officers respect the Holmes stories because Conan Doyle
was well ahead of the real police of the time in many of the basic tools with
which modern-day cops investigate, including forensics. Apparently Conan Doyle
was aware of the importance of securing a crime scene well before actual police
were!

Monday, August 24, 2015

Last night’s “feature” was a movie Lifetime showed a couple
of weeks ago, His Secret Family, written
and directed by Michael Feifer
for his modestly named Feifer Worldwide production company. It’s the sort of
movie where the very title gives the entire plot away, so it’s virtually
impossible to write a “spoiler” on this one: it opens in the bucolic country of
Big Bear, where heroine Sarah Goodman (Hillary Duff) is living with her husband
Jason (David O’Donnell) and their son Brandon (Judah Nelson). There are a few
wrinkles in their happiness; for one thing, Jason is almost never home — he’s a
sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, working the Southern
California territory, and he’s constantly either going to business meetings or
on the road. Also, the Goodmans have fallen behind on their bills and Sarah is
being inundated with calls from collection agents and is worried that their
home is going to be foreclosed on, and as if that weren’t enough to stir the Lifetime stewpot, Brandon
has come down with a genetic immune disorder and his only hope for survival is
a bone-marrow transplant from his dad. Only his dad picks the morning of
Brandon’s scheduled doctor’s appointment to disappear completely, and several
days go by with Sarah having no idea where her husband is. She calls the
police, and the call is taken by Detective Sharpson (Parker Stevenson, Shaun
Cassidy’s old sidekick on The Hardy Boys, who has not weathered
the years well) and his partner, Detective Miller (Nicholas Guilak). Unlike his
partner, Miller is very hot, with
one of those crotches that looks like he sandpapered the inside of his jeans;
he’s dark-haired and has a thin, well-trimmed beard, and he was about the only
male in the movie who was liable to inspire any fantasies in me! There’s a hint
in Feifer’s script that Detective Sharpton briefly dated Sarah before she
married Jason, but through most of the movie Sarah is convinced that the police
either don’t care about Jason’s disappearance or believe she did her husband
in.

She finds a clue in her husband’s old receipts — one from a private mailbox
in Santa Monica — and when she calls the drug company Jason supposedly works
for, she’s told they’ve never heard of “Jason Goodman” and the man in charge of
sales for Southern California is named “David Marcus.” Sarah drives out to
Santa Monica, leaving Brandon in the care of her sister Lauren (Mekenna Melvin)
— much to the kid’s disgust, who’s already used to being abandoned by his dad
and now is worried that his mom is going to start doing the same thing. She
stakes out the P. O. box after talking to the clerk and finding that they’ve never heard of Jason Goodman either, but David
Marcus is a client there.
Eventually David shows up and picks up his mail, and Sarah follows him home and
meets his other wife, Emily (Jennifer Aspen), and finds out that David a.k.a. Jason
was married to Emily well before he met Sarah — they have three children, two
of whom are grown while the third is in high school, while his son with Sarah,
Brandon, is still grade-school age. Sarah crashes David’s and Emily’s home by
posing as a real-estate broker interested in listing the house if it’s for
sale, but David comes home unexpectedly, he and Sarah confront each other and
David palms a broach from Emily’s grandmother and accuses Sarah of stealing it.
This not only ensures Emily’s continuing loyalty to her bigamous husband but
also makes it even harder for Sarah to enlist the aid of the police, though
eventually the cops realize that David a.k.a. Jason needs to be arrested
because he’s the prime suspect in the murder of yet another woman he was dating, Alison Woodburn (whom we never
see but on whose body was found a bracelet David, in his “Jason” identity, had
given Sarah).

In the film’s most chilling scene, David confesses to Emily and
then to Sarah that he just wanted another family, and now that it’s become too
expensive for him to support two wives and two households, he’s simply going to
“erase” his now-inconvenient second family. The matter-of-fact affect-less way
David O’Donnell delivers those lines is the most chilling part of his performance
and is downright scarier than most actors achieve cast as psychopaths, even
though by making his bigamist an out-and-out villain Feifer misses out on the
odd quasi-sympathy director Ida Lupino and her writers (Collier Young, Larry
Marcus and Lou Shorr) created for Edmond O’Brien’s character in the 1953 film The
Bigamist, to which His Secret
Family owes a lot plot-wise. It ends with the characters in two
dilemmas — David is determined to off Sarah but can’t do it until he can get
her to tell him where Brandon is so he can kill his son as well, while the
police want to capture David alive because if they kill him he can’t donate
bone marrow to the transplant that’s the only hope of saving Brandon’s life. Of
course it ends with David taken alive after an exciting boat chase across Big
Bear Lake — apparently the Goodmans’ budget, even drained by David’s/Jason’s
other household, was still big enough they could afford his-and-hers speedboats
— and Sarah gets away when David’s boat runs out of gas and ends up stuck going
around in circles, and a police boat crew comes upon him and duly takes him
into custody. His Secret Family
is about mid-range in quality for a Lifetime movie, neither as good nor as bad
as some of them, well acted by Hillary Duff and David O’Donnell and acceptably
performed by the rest of the cast, and with a script by Feifer that avoids some
of the melodramatic excesses of Lifetime at its worst even though it doesn’t
really delve into the characters, either — and for me the most sorrowful person
in the dramatis personae was the
first wife, Emily, who’s going to be left alone with a big house she can’t even
begin to afford and a sense that
the man she was married to for two decades not only betrayed her but at the end
turned out to be a cold-blooded psycho who calmly talked about “erasing” his
other family.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Last night I watched the so-called “world premiere” on
Lifetime of the film The Unauthorized “Full House” Story, a TV-movie about the production and run of a TV
sitcom called Full House that I
never watched when it was on (from 1987 to 1995) and haven’t seen an episode of
since, either. Of course I’d heard of some of the people who appeared on it,
including John Stamos, Bob Saget (though I knew him only as the host of an even
more putrid show, America’s Funniest Home Videos) and the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who
following my usual “rule” about child stars managed to achieve adult success
and psychological stability only by getting as far out of show business as they
could and embarking on another career once they grew up. In their case, they
managed to become hot-shot fashion designers, and though I’ve never heard of anything
they’ve designed (let’s face it, along with sports, fashion is one of the few
aspects of popular culture I’m even less interested in than I am in TV
sitcoms!), I can respect them for finding a career path that allows them to interface with celebrities without having to be part of the
red-carpet scene themselves. Since I’d never seen an episode of Full
House when it was new, nor was I
particularly interested in catching up on it now (I had vague memories of the
title but that was all), I probably shouldn’t have been watching this movie
except that Lifetime’s previews made it seem quite salacious, both sexually (at
one point John Stamos is dating Paula Abdul and he’s asked about it by an MTV
reporter, who then humiliates him by saying, “You’re still on that kids’ show,
aren’t you?”) and capitalistically (with the Olsen twins — who were double-cast
as the same character on Full House;
it’s a common dodge for producers to get around California’s laws limiting the
hours children can work by casting a pair of identical twins as a single
character — emerging as the stars of the show, their agent demands that their
salary be doubled — “each,” he quickly adds, meaning that the producers will
have to pay four times as much to them via their parents, who are having their
own argument since their dad wants to grab every quick buck he can from their
new-found fame while their mom wants them to have something of a childhood). Alas, The Unauthorized
“Full House” Story, despite some momentary
points of interest, was as dull and stupid as the show itself — as I’ve said
several times here already, I’ve never actually seen an episode of Full
House but judging from the samples included
here, the show was actually dull, stupid and excruciatingly unfunny. (Then
again, I find that true of virtually all alleged TV “comedies” — the nicest
thing I could say about them was what Dwight Macdonald said about the movies of
the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that “in form and intent can be called
comedies” — and all too often I’ve watched a TV sitcom in which the laugh track
howls with laughter and I want to take it aside and say, “What the hell do you think is so funny?”)

Though the film credits a
director, Brian K. Roberts, and a writer, Ron McGee, arguably its real
auteurs are the casting directors, Fern
Champion and Jackie Lind, who not only had to come up with actors who were
reasonable simulacra of the three adult stars of Full House — John Stamos (Justin Gaston, who if anything I
thought was even hotter than the original!), Bob Saget (Garrett Brawith), and
Dave Coulier (Justin Mader) — but had to come up with two actors apiece to play
the two older kid stars as they had aged during the show’s eight-year run
(Shelby Armstrong as the younger Candace Cameron and Brittney Wilson as the older
one; Dakota Guppy as the younger Jodie Sweetin and Jordyn Ashley Olson as the
older one), and three pairs of
identical twins to play the Olsens: Blaise and Kinsley Todd as the toddler
Olsens; Calla and Tyla Jones as the twins at age 6; and Kylie and Jordan
Armstrong at age 9. There was another Full House cast member, Andrea Barber, who also had to be
played by two people: Aislyn Watson as the younger one and Jaime (that’s a
girl) Schneider as the older. The series opens with Bob Saget congratulating
his friend Dave Coulier for having just landed a gig on the cast of Saturday
Night Live — only the producers of SNL withdraw the offer as quickly as they made it and
Coulier responds by leaving his cordless phone in the microwave and looking
like he’s about to take out his frustration by roasting it. Saget gets an offer
to be comic relief on CBS’s morning program, but he’s fired almost as soon as
he starts. Full House is the
brainchild of writer-producer Jeff Franklin (Matthew Kevin Anderson), whose
original idea is called House of Comics and is about the racy, raunchy adventures of three young straight male
stand-up comics sharing a house and each trying to break into the big-time
entertainment business — only when he pitches it to ABC, they tell him that due
to the success of The Cosby Show
(a name that plays very differently now than it did in 1987, when Bill Cosby
was considered the wholesome avatar of family values on TV — little did we know
then that in his dealings with women he was essentially Dr. Huxtable and Mr.
Hyde!), so on the spot Franklin tells them that one of the comics will be a
single dad (his wife having died three years earlier) raising three daughters.

With Bob Saget still busy on his CBS show they cast the pilot with John Posey
in the lead — only after it’s completed and ABC buys the show, once Saget is
fired by CBS and is therefore available again, Franklin fires Posey and
reshoots the pilot episode with Saget. The Behind the Headlines documentary on the real Full House cast, crew and staff shown immediately after the
movie includes interviews with both Franklin and Posey on this typical example
of Hollywood heartlessness, with Posey having long since reconciled himself to
losing out on a potentially career-making gig (he looks down and mumbles a lot
the way Pete Best used to when he
was interviewed about how it felt being fired by the Beatles just before they
broke through to superstardom) and Franklin justifying it by saying he’d always intended the role for Saget, that he’d conceived the
part around Saget’s approach and way of delivering lines, and therefore once he
was available it was a no-brainer to go with the actor for whom he’d crafted
the part in the first place. The rest of the Full House TV-movie cycles through a surprisingly dull set of
occurrences centered mainly around the fear of the parents of the child actors
on the show that Saget’s notoriously dirty mouth (when the story starts his
ambition is to become a stand-up star and Richard Pryor and George Carlin are
his stated role models) will unleash expletives they aren’t ready for their
kids to hear. In order to bond and become the best friends the show’s scripts
say they are, Stamos and Coulier suggest a trip to Las Vegas, and Saget
reluctantly goes along, leaving his wife behind — only when the other guys come
up with three women (no doubt hookers, though like its prototype this is still
enough of a “family” show that isn’t spelled out) to be their “dates,” Saget
begs off — it’s implied that he’s never had sex with a woman other than his wife, which makes it all the more
tragic when at the end of the run of Full House they divorce, mainly because taking on America’s
Funniest Home Videos on top of Full
House has made him so busy he hardly ever
has any time with their kids, and in one of the best lines of McGee’s script he
wryly comments that he’s spent eight years playing the single dad of three
daughters, and now that the show is over he suddenly is one.

Aside from that genuine moment of domestic
tragedy, and Coulier’s short-lived (two years) marriage while Stamos seems to
be nailing every young, attractive, available woman in Hollywood while carrying
a torch for Lori Laughlin (Stephanie Bennett), the actress brought into the
cast of Full House in mid-run to
play his on-screen girlfriend. Rumors persist that Lori was the great love of
Stamos’s life and the main reason they never got together was they were never
both single at the same time; though they’d dated briefly before she joined the
show, she was married when she was cast, and by the time she and her husband
broke up Stamos was already in love with model Rebecca Romijin (Ashley Diana
Morris) — the other cast members pronounce her last name “Romaine” and made me
briefly wonder why John Stamos had fallen head over heels for a head of
lettuce. The show offers little about the post-Full House lives of the cast members, and you’d have to keep
watching during the Behind the Headlines documentary to find out that not only did Candace Cameron marry a
Russian hockey player, Victor Bure (pronounced “burry”), she met at a celebrity
hockey match organized by Dave Coulier, but as a hard-core Christian (as is her
brother, Growing Pains star Kirk
Cameron), she wrote a book boasting of being “submissive” to her husband and
essentially letting him run their lives, which of course drew the predictable
hackles from all those hopelessly retro feminists out there. What’s more, the
film didn’t depict Jodie Sweetin’s descent into alcohol and drugs even though
one would have thought that, out
of all the aspects of the story, would have been the strongest and most
familiar territory for Lifetime’s filmmakers to work — according to the doc,
she eventually got into rehab, it actually worked, and like a lot of other
ex-addicts she took up addiction counseling as a career. There might have been
some interesting Lifetime movies locked up in the Full House story, but for the most part this is a pretty bland
and boring story, offering little of the titillation promised by the
“unauthorized” in the title — this is such a whitewash, quite frankly, Jeff
Franklin could have written it himself!

Friday, August 21, 2015

Last night Charles and I watched a great movie, The Wrong Man, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s least known and most
underrated movies, made in 1957 at Warner Bros. Hitchcock had had a rather
troubled tenure at Warners from 1948 to 1953; at first he was an independent
producer, working with British producer Sidney Bernstein for a company they
formed called Transatlantic Pictures which would distribute through Warners.
They made two films under this arrangement, Rope (1948), which was a modest success; and Under
Capricorn (1949), which was a bomb
financially even though it’s an uneven but often compelling film (and the last
and weakest of Hitchcock’s three collaborations with Ingrid Bergman). Then
Hitchcock signed to work for Warners directly and made four films there: Stage
Fright (1950), Strangers on a
Train (1951), I Confess (1953) and Dial “M” for Murder (1953). Of these, Strangers on a Train and Dial “M” for Murder did well at the box office, and Dial “M” pointed to the direction of his later career because
Grace Kelly was in it (it was their first of three films together) and
Hitchcock went over to Paramount on a more favorable deal — though, at least
according to his biographer John Russell Taylor, he went back to Warner Bros.
to make The Wrong Man “because he
felt he owed them something” to pay them back for the flops he’d made there
earlier. Well, The Wrong Man also
flopped, and it’s easy to see why — it wasn’t the sort of romantic thriller,
laced with sexual innuendo and comic relief, audiences were expecting from
Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950’s.

He was inspired to make it by reading a
magazine article about Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a
bass player at the posh Stork Club in New York City who’s married to Rose (Vera
Miles) and has two sons, 8-year-old Bob (Kippy Campbell) and 5-year-old Gregory
(Robert Essen), who in a rare moment of domestic not-quite-harmony he’s
offering to teach music. When the movie open the Balestreros’ main problem is
financial: they’re continually going into debt and then getting sucked back
into it just when they think they’re ready to start pulling their finances
together and getting ahead (sounds all too familiar!), and the latest crisis
that threatens to plunge them back into penury is an unexpected $300 dentist’s
fee for removing Rose’s impacted wisdom teeth. To raise the money, Manny takes
her life-insurance policy to the company that issued it so he can find out if
he can borrow enough on it to pay for Rose’s dental work. Only when he arrives
the three women who staff the office start acting squirrelly and one of them
ducks into the private office of the company’s boss — they suspect that Manny
is the man who held them up twice in a five-month period the previous year —
and Manny is ultimately picked up by the police and told to go into several
stores that were similarly held up to see if the people working there can
identify him as their robber. The
police essentially try to browbeat him into a confession — this was before the
U. S. Supreme Court mandated the Miranda warnings, so they not only don’t give him the warning that anything he
might say can be used in evidence against him (though that was already the law
in Hitchcock’s native Britain — in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of
the Dancing Men” the American criminal who’s just been arrested for a murder he
committed in the U. K. is given the warning with what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
calls “the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law”), they don’t
offer him the chance to call an attorney, and — what’s most irritating to Manny
— they don’t even give him the chance to call home and explain to his wife, his
kids and his mom (Esther Minciotti) why he hasn’t come home at 5:30 p.m. as he
had promised. (One odd aspect of the early part of the movie is it shows Manny
playing at the Stork Club all night and then running errands all day. When does
he sleep? And when did he and Rose find the time to have sex and produce the
kids?)

What makes The Wrong Man
such an unusual movie in the Hitchcock canon is that, because it was based on a
true story, he decided to shoot it in a semi-documentary manner, shooting as
much as possible on the real locations — the actual office building where the
holdups took place and the actual police station where Manny was held and the
courtroom where he was tried — though apparently, according to an imdb.com
“Trivia” poster, he drew the line at shooting in the freezing cold at the
resort in Cornwall in upstate New York where Manny and Rose, at the insistence
of his attorney (when he finally gets one!) Frank O’Connor (a former prosecutor
turned defense lawyer whom Hitchcock hired as one of his technical advisors),
have gone because they were staying there when one of the robberies occurred
and they’re hoping to find some of the other guests there at the same time so
they can serve as alibi witnesses. According to the imdb.com post, Hitchcock
refused to go into the cold weather of a New York winter; he sat in the car
while the scene was shot and moved the rest of the production to the familiar
environs of Hollywood. Nonetheless, The Wrong Man gains greatly from its documentary aspects — even
though someone actually incarcerated in the New York City jail when the film
was shot apparently recognized Fonda, thought he’d really been arrested and
asked, “What are you in for, Henry?” — and from Hitchcock’s utter refusal to
romanticize the story or go for his usual high-tension suspense editing.

In a
way, The Wrong Man is a better
film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial
than the one Orson Welles actually made from Kafka’s work; the frustrations
pile on for Manny, as the two alibi witnesses he thought he’d successfully traced turn out to be dead, his
long-awaited trial finally occurs — and is interrupted by a juror who stands up
during O’Connor’s cross-examination of one of the women at the insurance
company who identified him and says, “Why must we listen to all this?” Without
consulting Manny, O’Connor immediately moves for a mistrial, the prosecutor
makes no objection, and the judge grants the motion — only Manny has no idea
what just happened. When O’Connor tells him, Manny groans, “You mean I’ll have
to go through all this again?”
The biggest cross Manny has had to bear is the total mental breakdown of his
wife Rose, who starts to detach as they’re running around New York state
looking for anybody who can
testify they were somewhere else when the robberies occurred, and who ends up
in a mental institution after the psychiatrist who’d seen her says that’s the
only way to restore her to sanity. About the only “plant” in Maxwell Anderson’s
and Angus MacPhail’s script is that Manny is a devout Roman Catholic — when
he’s arrested and all his other possessions (including the $6 and change he was
carrying as well as his wife’s insurance policy, which he was trying to borrow
money on when all this started) are confiscated, he’s allowed to keep his
rosary beads. He’s shown fingering them at key moments in his ordeal, including
during the trial, and when he’s back home on bail his mom — who’s living there
because someone needs to help
take care of the kids with his wife hors de combat in a mental hospital — tells him to pray, he does
so, Hitchcock dollies his camera over to a sacred-heart painting on the wall …
and just then Manny’s prayers are answered as the real hold-up man (Richard
Robbins) attempts another robbery, the husband and wife who run the deli he’s
trying to stick up overpower him and call the police, and he’s finally
exonerated — though the woman who originally fingered Manny as her robber identifies
the new arrestee as the criminal, and one wonders what his attorney is going to make of this if the case ever
comes to trial: “But you were equally sure in the previous trial that it was
someone else!”

Through much of this movie Hitchcock plays against his usual strengths as a director: instead of moving
the action at a fast pace he slows himself down so we in the audience feel
Manny’s torment as bad break upon bad break piles up on the poor man. (This is
what I meant when I said this was a more “Kafka-esque” film than The
Trial; Manny is burdened not only by the
false accusation against him but by a legal system he doesn’t even begin to comprehend.) Though there are a few consciously
“artistically” framed shots, most of the movie is pretty plainly photographed
(by Hitchcock’s favorite cinematographer, Robert Burks, a Warners contract man
he’d started using while he was under contract there and had taken with him to
Paramount and Universal), and though he shot one of his usual cameo appearances
Hitchcock decided not to use it and instead appeared as himself, a shadowy
image, introducing the story and telling the audience, “This is Alfred
Hitchcock speaking. In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense
pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one. The
difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it. And
yet it contains elements that are stranger than all the fiction that has gone
into many of the thrillers that I’ve made before.” (According to imdb.com, this
is the only time Hitchcock spoke in a feature film, though by this time the Alfred
Hitchcock Presents TV show had been on the
air for two years and audiences were familiar with his voice — and in later
years he’d appear and speak in the trailers to Psycho
and The Birds.)

The
Wrong Man also has two of the finest
leading performances ever in a Hitchcock movie: Henry Fonda (an actor Hitchcock
had long wanted to work with, though they made only this one film together)
projects just the right combination of sincerity and ineffectuality — one
doesn’t believe this man could possibly be a street criminal but one also
doesn’t believe in him as the usual Hitchcockian man of action, anxious to
prove himself innocent of the charge against him by tearing off across the
country looking for the real culprit. Manny Balestrero, as Fonda brings him to
life, has a guileless faith all will work out for him even as his marriage, his
reputation and his life as he’s known it are crumbling to bits around him, and
as Charles pointed out, in his faith in God and his religion as the one force
in his life that really is on his
side, his story becomes an even more powerful portrayal of Hitchcock’s own
religiosity than his outright “Catholic” film, I Confess (though I regard that movie as another of
Hitchcock’s most underrated films and mentioned it in connection with The
Da Vinci Code and my wish Hitchcock could
have still been around to direct that). Charles also noted that The Wrong Man is one of the most openly proletarian of Hitchcock’s
movies; one would expect an Alfred Hitchcock film whose opening scene takes
place at the notoriously pricey Stork Club to be about a customer who gets into trouble with the law, not an employee
(and one could readily imagine Cary Grant’s character from North by
Northwest taking his latest girlfriend de
jour there before the events of that innocent-man-on-the-run story overtake him). Instead
of lashing himself on a cross-country journey after the real culprit the way
Robert Cummings’ character in Hitchcock’s Saboteur did, Manny doesn’t think until the very end of the
film that if he didn’t commit the robberies, someone out there did, and either
he’s still at large or he’s dead or he’s in jail for a crime he pulled in
another state and will never be linked to the ones Manny is accused of in New
York.

And Fonda’s excellence is fully matched by Vera Miles, who is utterly
haunting in her transformation from normal put-upon urban housewife to
withdrawn mental case. Aided by the Anderson-MacPhail script, which avoids
putting her through any obvious, stereotypical scenes of mad raving,
hair-pulling or the other silly ways most movies then depicted crazy women,
Miles nails every step of her gradual withdrawal from normal humanity and the
twisted view she acquires of her husband, her children and their relationships.
Especially chilling is the scene in which she has her moment of doubt and asks
Manny point-blank if he is indeed guilty. Hitchcock intended The
Wrong Man as the opening gun in his
campaign to make Vera Miles his next superstar (his replacement for Grace Kelly
after she quit acting to become the Princess of Monaco); he developed Vertigo as the film that would nail down the reputation he
expected her to get from The Wrong Man — only in the meantime Vera Miles married Gordon Scott, Hollywood’s
latest Tarzan, and got pregnant by him. Kim Novak replaced her in Vertigo and Hitchcock never forgave her (though he put her
in Psycho as Janet Leigh’s sister
because she was under contract to him and he figured he might get some work out of her for the money he was paying her);
years later he’d say things like, “She could have been the biggest star in
Hollywood — only she married that monkey!”

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Last night’s “feature” was Hollywood
Cavalcade, an entry in the second 20th
Century-Fox boxed set of The Films of Alice Faye, and while I could hope for a third box in the
series devoted to her pre-20th Century Fox films (including the quite fascinating 1935
musical Music Is Magic, which I
watched while the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow-Soon-Yi Previn scandal was in full
swing and seemed like an eerie anticipation of it in its tale of a young man
infatuated with an old-time musical star, played by Bebe Daniels, and steers
her to a comeback but also falls for her daughter, played by Alice Faye), this one
is quite compelling and has a number of her most important movies. Hollywood
Cavalcade was one of the first
attempts by a major movie studio to deal at least somewhat honestly with the
medium’s history, and in particular the era of silent films and the contentious
period in which they were suddenly (within two years) replaced by talkies. The
story opens in New York in 1913, in which aspiring actress Molly Adair (Alice
Faye) suddenly gets her big break when the star of a (real) play called The
Man Who Came Back takes sick in the middle
of a performance and Molly, her understudy, goes on in her place. She’s scouted
by Michael Linnett Connors (Don Ameche sans his trademark moustache, though he grows it later
in the film and looks more like himself), who when he isn’t covering theatre
for the New York Evening Record works as a prop boy and general factotum for the Globe movie studio in
Edendale, California. (Edendale was the original location for Mack Sennett’s
Keystone studio; this is one of the many references to Sennett’s career in
which the script — written by the usual committee: Lou Breslow, “original
idea”; Hillary Lynn and Brown Holmes, “story”; Ernest Pascal, “screenplay”; and
uncredited contributions by James Edward Grant and silent-film director Malcolm
St. Clair, who’s also listed on imdb.com as uncredited director for the
silent-movie sequences — abounds.)

Connors signs Molly to a personal contract
and gets Globe to pay her the then-handsome sum of $100 per week — double what
she was getting on stage — and plans to star her in a big dramatic feature.
Only her screen test (with Buster Keaton, of all people, as her leading man —
and he’s also listed on imdb.com as an uncredited co-director of the sequences
reproducing silent comedy) is being shot on the same stage as a comedy scene by
one of Globe’s other units, and unable to react convincingly as a dramatic
actor when a stock roué villain
puts the make on his girlfriend, Keaton instead goes into a comedy routine that
ends up with him throwing a pie at the bad guy, missing and hitting Molly
instead. Connors realizes he’s onto something and sends one of his staffers to
buy 500 custard pies a day from a local baker (the real pies in Sennett’s films
were usually fakes made with shaving cream, but in this film the pies are
actually edible). Molly becomes an instant star and Connors walks out of Globe
and sets up his own company to make first comedies, then dramatic features,
with her. He also hires an actor named Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis) to be her
romantic leading man, only their relationship gets too romantic for Connors’ taste; the three of them are
scheduled to take a vacation, only Connors remains behind working out ideas for
new pictures, and while they’re alone together, proximity works its magic and
Molly and Nicky fall in love and get married for real. They’re willing to
continue working for Connors, but he’s so pissed off at Molly for hooking up
with Nicky instead of him that he fires them both, making the famous-last-words
speech of just about every fictional movie producer in a movie that if he can
make one pair of stars, he can make another. Only, while Nicky and Molly rise
up the Hollywood food chain to a contract with Metro and then a berth at United
Artists, Connors loses all his money on a big-budget epic called Queen of
the Nile (two decades before 20th-Century
Fox would take a real-life financial bath on the Liz Taylor Cleopatra), he walks out on two major-studio contracts over
“creative interference,” and his house is foreclosed on and he’s written off by
the business until Molly Adair tries to salvage the career of the man who
discovered her by insisting on him as director of her new film, Common Clay.

They’re in the middle of producing this when
Molly and Nicky are involved in a car accident while racing to get to the
location on time; Nicky is killed (well, the writers had to do something to eliminate the extraneous character!) and Molly
is laid up in the hospital for two to three months. While all this has been
happening Warner Bros. has released The Jazz Singer, it’s been an enormous hit and Molly’s producer,
worried that if they wait for her to recover and complete the movie it will
seem hopelessly out of date as a silent, wants to shoot a quick final scene
with a double for Molly and rush it out while there’s still a market for silent
films. Only Connors steals the negative and refuses to give it back unless he’s
allowed to come back and finish the movie his way, with Molly finishing her role and with the
script rewritten to include sequences with sound so it won’t be written off as obsolete. This duly happens, and
at the end, with a hit on their hands and Molly Adair having navigated the
transition from silent to sound quite ably, she and Connors seem headed for a
reunion off screen as well. Hollywood
Cavalcade is often referred to as a film
à clef about the real-life
professional and personal relationship of
Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, and Sennett himself was involved in this
production; he not only consulted on the silent comedy scenes (which don’t have
quite the panache of the original but are
still screamingly funny and among the best parts of the film) but actually
appears as himself, speaking at a testimonial dinner to Molly Adair which a
decidedly inebriated Connors crashes in a scene pretty obviously ripped off
from the Academy Awards sequence of the 1937 A Star Is Born. It is and it isn’t; obviously the writers and
director Irving Cummings (an efficient traffic cop, as usual) didn’t dare
depict the real reason Sennett’s and
Normand’s off-screen romance broke up (she caught him in flagrante delicto with another one of his actresses, Mae Busch), but
the film is full of Sennettesque anecdotes and even the plot twist of a
director stealing the negative of an uncompleted film and essentially using it
to hold the studio hostage really happened to Sennett, though at the other end.
In 1918 Sennett’s production Mickey, Mabel Normand’s first feature, had gone through four directors and the
last one, F. Richard Jones, was having a major argument with Sennett over his
salary. Unable to get the increase he wanted, Jones stole the negative of Mickey and refused to give it up until Sennett paid him
the extra money; Sennett paid up, Mickey got finished, and upon release it was the third biggest hit of the
entire silent era (topped only by The Birth of a Nation and The Big Parade). But Connors’ descent into dramatic spectacle,
his financial failure, his troubled dealings with the major studios and his
descent into alcoholism sound like the writers were tapping D. W. Griffith for
their second act.

Hollywood Cavalcade is quite an entertaining movie, a rare Alice Faye vehicle in which she
doesn’t sing — and though they shot her performing a song, “Whispering,” which
wasn’t used in the final cut, the film isn’t hurt much by her vocal silence
even though she’s not much of an actress and gets by in the role on an
appealing personality and a hauntingly beautiful face (including the blue eyes
which look spectacular in three-strip Technicolor — it was Faye’s first color
film — even though they would have bedeviled cameramen in the silent era since
the films were too slow to reproduce blue — cinematographer James Wong Howe
“made his bones” by figuring out how to photograph blue-eyed actress Mary Miles
Minter without having her eyes go white: he hid himself and his camera behind a
black curtain, “bounced” light off of it and thereby got a shadow on Minter’s
eyes so they looked normal on screen). It’s nice for once to see a film made in
1939 that doesn’t regard the silent era as
so hopelessly old-fashioned no one should bother watching its movies — though
it’s revealing that the film reproduced silent comedy but didn’t try to do a scene from one of Molly’s
dramatic films because silent drama, especially romantic drama, would have been
considered risible to a 1939 audience — and though it’s hardly at the level of
the first two A Star Is Borns or Singin’ in the Rain it is a quite estimable take
from Hollywood on its own history